Makai Wars

» see makaiwars-sp.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nippon Ichi Software announced Makai Wars at E3 on 12 May 2004 as a PlayStation Portable game due before the end of 2004. It was put on hold by April 2005 and re-announced for the PlayStation 3 that September, after which it went quiet for more than a decade. There was never a cancellation notice. It simply stopped being mentioned, and the studio shipped Phantom Kingdom on the PlayStation 2 in its place.

The reason anybody remembers the title has little to do with the game. Its heroine, Asagi, had been designed to star in it, and once the game failed to appear she was folded into other Nippon Ichi releases as a joke about her own non-existence. Fans called her the eternal next-game protagonist. She would turn up in a Disgaea title to complain that her game still had not come out. The company kept the bit running for thirteen years, re-registering the trademark in 2010 and hinting at an anniversary reveal in 2013 that never materialized.

The game that finally arrived on 15 February 2018 was not the one that had been announced. This one was a free-to-play smartphone strategy RPG, built by Clover Lab in Osaka as a crossover between its own Yurudorasil and the Disgaea cast, with Nippon Ichi co-operating it. Asagi got the lead role and, after players asked for it, a voice. The president of Nippon Ichi marked the launch by saying that Asagi had finally been married off.

It ran for 1,709 days. New content stopped at the fourth-anniversary update on 18 February 2022, the shutdown was announced on 22 August, and the service ended on 21 October 2022 at 16:00 Japan time. Clover Lab opened a three-month window to refund unused currency by bank transfer, as Japanese payment law requires, and that window closed in January 2023.

~ the chronicle ~

~ thirteen years of a joke ~

The gag worked because it was built out of real disappointment. Every time Asagi appeared in another game asking about her own, she was pointing at an announcement the company had made and not kept. Nippon Ichi was unusually willing to make that the punchline rather than quietly bury it, which is why the title stayed in people's mouths for over a decade without a single playable minute attached to it.

Measured against the clock, the joke outlasted the product comfortably. From the E3 announcement to the mobile reveal is thirteen years and two months. From launch to shutdown is four years and eight months. Asagi spent nearly three times as long being a character who had no game as she did being a character with one.

~ the shape of the decline ~

The opening was strong by the studio's own standards. Clover Lab announced 200,000 downloads eight days in and 500,000 by 6 April 2018. At the one-year mark the Nippon Ichi president told Famitsu the game had taken about six weeks to reach sales he had expected to need ten months for, and described running a live service as looking after a theme park that never closes. This was the company's first real attempt at games as a service.

After that the curve only went one way. No further download milestone was ever announced, the title never reached the top of any Japanese chart, and third-party estimates put its last full year at roughly one percent of its first. The content freeze in February 2022 left 245 days of maintenance mode before anyone said the word shutdown.

~ where it never went ~

Makai Wars never left Japan. Neither console version ever shipped anywhere at all, and the phone game that did ship was Japanese-language only on Japanese storefronts. English-speaking players who wanted in relied on fan-written guides. The joke it was built on needed a decade of Nippon Ichi releases to even parse, so the audience for the punchline was always going to be people who had been buying those games in that country the whole time. When the service ended, the game stopped existing everywhere at once, because there was only ever one place it existed.

~ the part nobody explained ~

No reason for the closure was ever published. The termination notice gives dates and refund instructions and no cause, and the Japanese games press reported it the same way, having nothing further on the record to add. A game whose entire public identity had been a thirteen-year running commentary on its own delays went out without a word about why.

One adjacent fact is worth recording without drawing a line through it. Sohei Niikawa, the Nippon Ichi president who had kept the Asagi joke alive and who announced her wedding at launch, resigned on 19 August 2022 for reasons given only as personal. The shutdown was announced three days later. No source connects the two events, and this one does not either.

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